The History of Linux: How Linux Became Everyone’s Favorite

Short Bytes: Looking back at the history of Linux, we remember the Linux project announcement made by the Linux creator Linus Torvalds on August 25, 1991. Here, we’ll shed some light on the history of Linux and how it became everyone’s favorite.

Talking about the glorious history of Linux, we would like to remind you that Linux is all around you and the whole internet is powered by Linux. Google search you perform, many smart devices you use to make your world a more comfortable place and the Android phones you use- everything is powered by Linux.

Long before Linux, there was Unix, created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in 1969. Later, the Linux project announcement was made by the Linux creator Linus Torvalds on August 25, 1991. In 1991, 21-year-old Linus Torvalds was a second-year computer science student and a self-made hacker. He worked on Linux as he was unsatisfied with MINIX as it was just an OS designed as a teaching tool and it didn’t have much industry application.

Behind the inspiration to create Linux, there are many stories floating on the internet. One story tells that he wrote the kernel to get a better functionality of the new Intel 386 system he had. The second one states that he wasn’t allowed to further improve MINIX, so he made his very own Linux. The third legend states that while navigating and playing around in MINIX, he piped data to his data drive instead of his modem and erased his MINIX partitions. This frustrated him and realizing the limits on MINIX, he created his own.

In the release note for Linux 0.01, Linus writes:

The Linux kernel has been made under minix, and it was my original idea to make it binary compatible with minix. That was dropped, as the differences got bigger, but the system still resembles minix a great deal.